


Bananas and Jiffy Lube

by molo (esteefee)



Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-21
Updated: 2006-06-21
Packaged: 2017-10-17 10:09:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/175709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esteefee/pseuds/molo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Starsky's no kid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bananas and Jiffy Lube

Starsky's no damned kid. 

See,  _that's_  what they don't know about him, all our friends who watched him beat back death with a running line of jokes; or Lisa, who once played doodletown make-believe with him; or Molly and Kiko, who feel like they've outgrown him now that they are twenty-one and have put baseball mitts and fishing poles behind them. 

Everyone thinks he's a kid--a big, bouncy, happy kid--in spite of the silver threaded in the brown, and the deep lines that came from the pain and stayed afterward as a permanent reminder. 

Starsky is no damned kid. And the clown act is no act--it's part of him. The same guy who once gave me a twenty-minute lecture on why bananas are the perfect food; the same guy who, when the first Jiffy Lube opened in Bay City, insisted on going to the grand opening and getting his free balloon, is the one who sat with me when I was dying, and took the pain from my chest with the touch of his gloved hands. They are the same man. 

Starsky is just a different kind of adult, a type I never encountered while growing up--one who doesn't take everything so goddamned seriously, as if a spilled glass of orange juice is the End of the World. To Starsky, spilled juice is just an excuse to get me out of my jeans. 

Actually, he doesn't even need that much of an excuse. 

See? Now he's got my hands pinned to the mattress, and he's making these noises while he sucks me, sounding like a lion rumbling as it licks the flesh from an antelope. Lions do that, did you know? They use that big, rough tongue, licking and licking, and they  _purr_ while they eat their prey, still living. 

Ignoring the whimpers. 

He does me like  _that_ , and his eyes, when they look up at me, are dark-dark, like deep blue ink, and there is no kid hiding back there, but an ancient, merciless hunger. He owns me, and he knows it. 

So it's not like he's looking at the world through a child's eyes or some quaint garbage. His eyes have seen way, way too much for a child to survive behind them. 

And maybe that's why he's the way he is. I think the child was taken early. Taken inside while his father lay still warm on the sidewalk, and sat down on a hard stool by the door, and told he was the man of the house now. And so he is a man, not a child, and the clowning is just his way of reaffirming what he learned so young--nothing is so important as that which  _truly_  is. 

And everything else is just a joke. 

 _Fin._


End file.
